It is a sudden, sharp vertigo, the kind that makes the kitchen floor feel like the edge of an abyss. I have been holding my breath, waiting for the arrival. I thought: if I reach that point, if I grasp that achievement, the lock will click. I imagined happiness as a heavy gold coin I could finally pocket and keep forever.

But happiness is not a monument. It is not a house one builds and then inhabits with folded arms. It is a multifaceted, elusive vibration, a thing that exists only in the flickering of its own disappearance.

I see now the exhaustion of my own clinging. I wanted to freeze the river, but the river only lives because it moves. To search for a “fixed point” of joy is to seek the stillness of a grave. Life is not a destination; it is a wild, unkempt series of challenges, a breathing organism of ups and downs.

The Flow: I must learn the grace of the seaweed, which survives the tide not by standing tall, but by yielding.

The Flux: My emotions, my relationships, even this “Self” I guard so fiercely, they are made of sand. They shift before I can even name them.

The Sacred Decay
Everything tends toward entropy. We are taught to fear this, but isn’t there a strange beauty in the crumbling? To accept change is to accept the heartbeat of the universe itself.

We are a permanent, agonizing cycle of death and rebirth. A thousand tiny funerals happen inside us every day: the death of a habit, the end of a feeling, the shedding of an old skin. And in that decay, the soil is prepared for what comes next.

I let go of the “secret.” The secret is that there is no secret, only the raw, pulsing courage to exist in the change. To breathe in the entropy. To be, simply, and painfully, alive.

©️ Beatriz Esmer